Some computing devices ship with multiple operating systems installed by the manufacturer. For example, a computing device may include both a general-purpose operating system such as Microsoft® Windows™ as well as a mobile-oriented operating system such as Android™. In such a multiple-operating-system environment, a product which ships in such a configuration runs the risk of having a user inadvertently deleting “unnecessary” partitions or perturbing data which is not owned by the currently active operating system.
Many computing devices include firmware responsible for hardware initialization, low-level hardware management, and managing the boot process. In particular, in a device with multiple operating systems, during pre-boot the platform firmware may select and load a boot target corresponding to one of the installed operating systems. The main platform firmware responsible for booting the computing device may be implemented according to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (“UEFI”) specification, which has several versions published by the Unified EFI Forum. The UEFI specification specifies an interface between the firmware of the computing device and the installed operating systems of the computing device.